AviSynth Is Not Dead: Mario Anime Movie Restoration Comparison
80A comparison of the original version and my attempt at restoring the "Super Mario Bros.: Great Mission to Rescue Princess Peach!" movie (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciUIWWcTI2E).
The first thing to say is that the source video is YouTube-compressed and thus the result is underwhelming compared to what it could have been with the original 4K source. The low quality of the source motivated my decision to wipe out the grain and the lack of a better color/brightness adjustment.
When it comes to the filters used, it's nothing too sophisticated, so there's clearly room for improvement:
* MDegrain for denoising.
* KillerSpots for dirt removal.
* GradFun3 for mitigating banding artifacts in the source video.
* AutoLevels and Expr for brightness/saturation adjustments.
* Gradation for color tweaking.
* DePanEstabilize for stabilization.
I will publish the script in the future.
An interesting point about this is that, to produce this video, 64-bit AviSynth+ for Linux has been used, something which was unimaginable a few years ago. This also means that all the filters used are free and open source.
During the development of this restoration I found a bunch of bugs in the source code of AviSynth+ and some of the filters I used, which I reported and even fixed some of them. I also adapted the Gradation Curves VirtualDub filter to AviSynth. So, in the end, this has turned out quite useful.